By Michael Newlands
The movers and shakers of the international internet industry are winging their way home, with dollar signs in their eyes, following a major conference in Beijing last week which outlined the medium’s explosive growth potential in what is already the world’s fastest growing IT and telecoms market. But they would do well to ponder, once the initial adrenaline rush has died down, just where they fit into China’s, and the worldwide Chinese- language internet community’s, long-term vision of the virtual future. To anybody in the IT industry the figures being bandied about are by now well known. The subscriber base nearly doubled in the first eight months of the year to around 1.2 million users, an expected four to five million by 2000 and eight to 10 million by 2002, depending on whose crystal ball you gaze into. Those who have been keeping a closer eye on developments will know of the Education Ministry’s plans to give all school teachers in the country crash courses in computing, and to get every school onto the internet – or more accurately the China- wide intranet. Of the Government Online Project, to be launched early next year, which aims to interconnect government offices around the country and promote government web sites providing both information and services. Of the Golden Trade Project which aims to form a basic structure for electronic commerce in the country, and has been set a target of getting 80% of the country’s enterprises online within three years.
Strict control
With business, government and academia all rushing onto the net, in a series of projects controlled by key ministries such as Trade, Information Industry and Education (and with Public Security keeping an eye on proceedings) China clearly has big plans for the internet. In the words of the Peter Yip of China Internet Corporation (CIC), the country’s top ISP and main portal to the world: The internet is one of the most important engines of China’s growth into the next century. But the development of the internet is China is a tightly-scripted affair, with the government firmly in control, quite unlike the anarchic growth in the West. There are four state-owned companies with international portals, and the hundreds of local service providers must go through them for access to international content. Which international sites can be accessed is strictly controlled, although censorship is a lot more liberal than in the case of print and broadcast media. The Chinese government doesn’t particularly want the internet to bring the world to China, or at least not those many aspects of the outside world it would rather its citizenry was not exposed to, but it does want to use it to bring China to the world and to cash in on its potential for trade, education and communication within China. There are a large number of hugely-successful, English-language, government- sponsored web sites bringing Chinese products, services and information to the international market. The Trade Ministry launched a massive site in June, called China Market, which enables potential buyers to browse through products ranging from steel wire to silk carpets, and provides online business chat rooms for negotiations. It reported more than 100,000 visitors a day in its first week, and traffic has been on the increase ever since. Individual industries have their own sites like China Chemical Network, which has brought in thousands of export orders for more than 500 chemical firms since it was launched earlier this year. The site, which charges member firms $1,800 a year, claims more than 10,000 visitors a day. While China’s contacts with the English-language, US-dominated web are mainly from the inside out, the real growth area is in the Chinese- language part of the net both within China and around the world. The Chinese Diaspora has scattered somewhere between 50 million and a 100 million ethnic Chinese around the world, and while many of them are second and third generation who do not read Chinese, many millions of them do.
Collaboration with ‘Greater China’
Apart from the two million (and quickly growing) internet subscribers in Taiwan, the 600,000 in Hong Kong, and close to that number in Singapore, there are an estimated four to five million people in other countries who can and do read Chinese web sites. Written Chinese is the same whichever dialect somebody may speak, and there is a simplified form used in mainland China. The traditional form is used elsewhere, but freely downloadable software switches from one to the other at the click of a mouse. It is the non-Mainland Chinese population which initially pioneered the international Chinese web, but China has been quick to harness what has been done and ready itself to assume a leadership role, in collaboration with the other components of Greater China – Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. The China Wide Web which is being rapidly developed by CIC as the foundation of the Chinese intranet, includes Chinese language-web sites wherever they are. In an important sign of how the Chinese- speaking world sees the development of an alternative Chinese- language internet, Singapore and China have just signed an agreement to set up a 2Mbps telecoms link between the two countries. Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said: This is part of an overall Asia Pacific Information Infrastructure vision to build intra-regional connectivity within the Asia Pacific region, in order to break away from the US-centric architecture of internet. It is only this year that user-friendly search engines and directories have been launched for the tens of thousands of sites on the Chinese Web. First out of the blocks last March, was Beijing company Internet Technologies China with Sohoo, which translates as Search Fox, followed in April by SinaSearch from independent Taiwanese software developer SinaNet. Before launching its own Chinese-language directory and search engine, Yahoo negotiated with Soohoo about a possible partnership, but was rebuffed. However, Intel and two other US investors put $2m into Soohoo which by now had 50,000 Chinese- language sites catalogued. So the Chinese Yahoo joined the fray in May, with around 10,000 sites listed, and Yahoo opened a new Greater China office in Hong Kong in June. Netscape also got into the act in May via a joint venture with the Hong Kong branch of CIC, while AltaVista re-launched its service to support multiple languages including Chinese. Then the people at Excite got together with the people at SinaSearch and decided on a joint venture, based in Taipei, which also started in June. I was totally seduced and overwhelmed by the scale of opportunities, said Yahoo vice president Heather Killen after the Beijing conference. But the main contract signed by Yahoo on the sidelines of the conference was an outward-bound one with Chinese government-owned online marketing company Infoshare, which will bring Chinese advertisers to Yahoo’s international sites. Carving out a market-leading niche on the increasingly centrally-planned Chinaweb is going to be a very different proposition from heady growth in that freest of free markets, the World Wide Web. รก
